Tips On Composing Music

I've not written here for quite some time.

I'll just get right to it.

You know that moment you're at work (like a normal day job work) and you REALLY want to write some music, but then you get home and you just feel like doing something else? I hate when that happens, so I open up the DAW (FL Studio or more recently SONAR), but then another moment occurs.

It's the moment when you're playing and find something awesome, but then there's the gap of "Do I wanna make this into an actual song or just keep it as is and continue messing around?"

I've been trying to figure out how to bridge the hump in that "moment". Like, if I feel I want to go with that idea, I then have to switch out of creative mode and switch into technical mode so I can set up the tempo and the recording stuff.

What I've found is helpful to bridge that gap a little is to just hit record and play. Don't worry about the BPM or if it's quantized or even if you make mistakes. It's just a mockup. What? Theentire song is being played with a pizzicato string? No big deal, it's just an idea anyway. You can then flush it out after the main idea is done.

The worst thing you can do is to focus  so much on the small details of one part of the song when the other parts aren't even laid down in any form. If you do this, then you'll most likely start thinking about things like "what kind of drums should go here?" and "Should the bass have a delay or reverb?". Forget about all of that. Just put down the piece in its rawest form. THen flush it out as you go along.

I don't know how everyone else does it, but I have to start doing this a bit more and the pieces I have done it on turn out well and have a bit more to them. You can actually tell which pieces those are if you listen closely.

Port City of Rubia started out as a simple Koto sound playing all the parts. There are a few other songs like this.

Although sometimes I plan them out in my head way in advance so when I sit down I know almost exactly what I'm doing.

Welp I could go on, but that's about it.

Have a blessed one.